Born in the despair of the Great Depression, flourishing in the first radioactive blush of the nuclear age, Noir really is more a sensibility than a style, and the tenth issue of Black Clock operates on the premise that Twenty-First Century Noir is a mutated thing that still bears kinship with the original.  Robert Polito finds early signs of noir all the way back in Eighteenth Century America in “It Would Be a Queer World If,”  and Dana Spiotta takes a look at one of the classic Fifties film noirs in “First is First, Second is Nobody.”  In Diana Wagman’s “The Five Elements of Noir,” some noir archetypes find the movie they’re in has taken them over.  The genre gets decidedly weird with Michael Ventura’s cross-dressing private-eye in “One Marilyn Too Many,” and becomes altogether supernatural in stories by Denise Hamilton and Francesca Lia Block.  And amid work by major contemporary authors Scott Bradfield, Brian Evenson, Geoff Nicholson and others, Black Clock 10 also identifies 70 essential noir movies, novels, comics, poems, paintings, performances and pieces of music.

Now among the nation’s foremost literary magazines, Black Clock has showcased award-winning writing by established and emerging authors, with pieces anthologized in best-of-the-year collections and two excerpted novels going on to win National Book Awards.

Black Clock is published semi-annually by the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) MFA Writing Program.